Monday, February 18, 2013

Justified

By Capt. FoggIt isn't common for the U.S. media to make an issue of the level of
violence in South Africa, but Oscar Pistorius is a celebrity and the
woman he's accused of murdering was a celebrity. The lives of our
secular pantheon are important to the public and particularly if the
celebrity has to do with sports. Are the successful athletes we love to
appoint as role models, whom we love to pretend to emulate, really
paragons of virtue and discipline or does their drive, their ego, their
motivation spill over into something sometimes less than wholesome? I'm
not going to generalize about the famous, but like the U.S., South
Africa is a violent nation and one with a long history of violent racism
and violent crime, and a population with a large difference between
haves and have-nots. The murder rate is high, about 50 per day, and
while I read that only about 12% of South Africans own guns, the
probability is that many more are not reported and are illegally owned.White
middle- and upper-class South Africans live in fear, and those who can
afford to live in gated enclaves behind iron barred doors and windows,
behind electrified fences with sophisticated alarm systems and armed
security guards -- and they own guns. The standard of living is lower
for non-whites, but the level of fear is high for all, and one can argue
that it's justified. Guns are used in 77 per cent of house robberies and
87 per cent of
business robberies, and they are the cause of death in more than half of
all murders. Many burglars are seeking guns over other items.South
Africa is often described as a "gun-loving" country. Yes, of course, if
one lives on a remote farm in the bush, there are leopards and lions and
hippos and elephants that argue for heavy arms, but I think that for
the most part owning a gun is all about crime and a sense of security
in a violent nation.

According to Wikipedia, a survey for the period 1998–2000 compiled by the United Nations Office
on Drugs and Crime ranked South Africa second for assault and murder
(by all means) per capita and first for rapes per capita in a data set
of 60 countries. Total crime per capita was 10th out of the 60 countries
in the dataset. A study by the government on the nature of crime in
South Africa concluded that the country is exposed to high levels of
violence as a result of different factors, including:

The
normalization of violence. Violence comes to be seen as a necessary and
justified means of resolving conflict, and males believe that coercive
sexual behaviour against women is legitimate.

The reliance on a criminal justice system that is mired in many issues, including inefficiency and corruption.

A
subculture of violence and criminality, ranging from individual
criminals who rape or rob to informal groups or more formalized gangs.
Those involved in the subculture are engaged in criminal careers and
commonly use firearms, with the exception of Cape Town where knife
violence is more prevalent. Credibility within this subculture is
related to the readiness to resort to extreme violence.

The
vulnerability of young people linked to inadequate child rearing and
poor youth socialization. As a result of poverty, unstable living
arrangements and being brought up with inconsistent and uncaring
parenting, some South African children are exposed to risk factors which
enhance the chances that they will become involved in criminality and
violence.

The high levels of inequality, poverty, unemployment, social exclusion and marginalization.

Much of this should seem familiar to
Americans, and the kind of justification many Americans feel in owning
guns is the same. Discussions of gun control in South Africa have
understandably become as heated as they once again have in the U.S. after
high-profile, heavily-publicized murders, but in neither place will
effective debate be conducted without acknowledging the various reasons
people buy and own guns, without acknowledging the kinds of perpetrators
and their proportion. Not as long as we focus on undoing the latest
headline, not as long as we depend on fear rather than fact. In
both nations, the murder rate is declining. In South Africa, after
tougher limits on gun ownership took effect in 2004, the number of
gun-related crimes has dropped by 21 per cent. The Globe and Mailtells us that this decrease is not merely because of a general decline in crime in
South Africa. One study of female victims, we are told, by the country's Medical
Research Council, found that gun-related deaths had dropped by nearly
half from 1999 to 2009, while other causes of violent death were
virtually unchanged. You'd think you'd hear us talk more about the how and why of it. In
the U.S., gun-related violence has been declining for longer and has
declined further. Does this argue that gun control can be effective? I
think it does. Does this prompt us to improve our efforts along the
same lines and with regard to underlying causes? I think it does, yet
in the U.S. I see little effort being made to acknowledge this, to look at
what works and what has not worked -- but rather we seem to champion
ideas without support of experience, despite experience while demonizing
the pragmatic, scientific efforts. Too many of our arguments and most
of the angriest seem to have more to do with blaming certain weapons
with certain appearances or often fictitious attributes and rely on
using certain kinds of descriptions designed to inflame, not to inform
-- and may people who agree in principle that there are things we can do
to lower the violence and the fear find it impossible to work together,
to cooperate through the barrage of passionate slogans and shoddy
shibboleths. Too many of our arguments depend on denial and
maintaining, despite the truth, that everything is getting worse as if
hope were an enemy, confidence a conspiracy and truth irrelevant.We
Americans seem to think that nothing that works elsewhere can work
here, that we are so unique in our nature and the nature of our problems
that we retreat into solipsism and blindness. In fact, looking at our
history of prohibitions and bans and the emotional dishonesty and
selective blindness that supported them, it seems to be an American
tradition of long standing.(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)